That's just incredible. People used to be so much better at programming, or at least great programmers had it easier to get funded. Most of what I see today is exceptionally low quality and just getting worse with time.
The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
101–110 of 199 posts
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#102Speaking of the size: my first PC, built by a family friend, had a 80MB disk, split into two partitions. The second 40MB partition had Windows 3.1 and about two Norton Commander columns full of games on it, largest of which were Wolfenstein 3D and Lost Vikings with about 1.4MB each. Truly a different era.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#103I was comparing games prices last week and I found that prices from the 80s aren't too different from modern game prices.
Elite was £20 in 1984 and that would be £66 today, which is not very different from what a good game for the PS5 costs today.
Except that games then were made by one or two people and nowadays games are made by teams with coders, musicians, artists, etc.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#104Despite being a mid-late-millennial, I can see how this played out. Even compared to the second family computer my parents got in the late 90's, which was an absolute monster at the time, I do realize how many corners and shortcuts developers had to make to get a game going in a few hundred megabytes, seeing mobile games today easily exceeding 10 times that, and not just now but even 10 years ago when I was working a…
Yes this is a great methodology. I found developing BrowserBox (which is real time interactive streaming for remote browsers), using slow links, and a variety of different OS, really stresses parts of the system and causes improvements to be necessary that strengthen the whole.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#105I was looking at a production service we run that was using a few GBs of memory. When I add up all the actual data needed in a naive compact representation I end up with a few MBs. So much waste. That's before thinking of clever ways to compress, or de-duplicate or rearrange that data. Back in the day getting the 16KB expansion pack for my 1KB RAM ZX81 was a big deal. And I also wrote code for PIC microcontrollers th…
There was one time I was troubleshooting why an app used at a company would crash after some amount of time passed. Investigating the crash dumps showed it using 4GB of ram before it died, suspiciously the 32 bit limit of its application.
Turned out they never closed the files it worked on, so over time it just consumed ram until there wasn’t any more for it to access.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#106I wonder could you make a fame that small by using svgs?
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#107A game which was actually 40 kilobytes: Super Mario Bros. It had 32 side-scrolling levels.
27 unique levels. 40KB minus a handful of spare bytes and some unused code. The max the NES can support without mappers. Modern NES homebrew and demoscene can do fancier stuff with this budget given the extra decades of learned tricks, but for the state of console gaming in 1985, SMB1 is damn impressive.
Also remember all of that was ROM, the NES had a mere 2 kilobytes of RAM for all your variables and buffers.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#108Oh man the tape loading time. I dreamed about being able to afford a disk drive.
The loading music is exceptional and I enjoyed listening to it while waiting. I still occasionally listen to it.
Last Ninja has my favorite music from the C64 era.
Have you listened to the live versions by the Fastloaders? They had Ben Daglish before he passed away.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#109A few years ago, I decompiled a good part of the PC version of Might & Magic 1 for fun. According to Wikipedia, it had been released in 1986, although I don't know whether that refers to the PC version or to the original Apple II version. It is a quite big game: the main executable is 117KB, plus around 50 overlay files of 1.5 KB each for the different dungeons and cities, plus the graphics files. I guess it was even…
>When you want to cast a spell you have to enter the number of the spell from the manual, maybe because there was not enough memory to fit the names of the 94 spells into RAM
Probably not ;) "Enter things from a manual" was a tried old copy protection technique. If you used the warez version you presumably did not have a manual so you got stuck. This didn't run on the 8008 or whatever, I'm sure the game could have known the names of spells fairly easily.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#110Most games back then where small. An C64 only had 64k and most game didn't use all of it. An Atari 800 had max 48k. It wasn't until the 1200 that it went up. Both systems are cartridge based games, many of which were 8k. Honestly though, I don't read much into the sizes. Sure they were small games and had lots of game play for some defintion of game play. I enjoyed them immensely. But it's hard to go back to just a f…
> Sure they were small games and had lots of game play for some defintion of game play. I enjoyed them immensely. But it's hard to go back to just a few colors, low-res graphics, often no way to save, etc... for me at least, the modern affordances mean something.
On one hand, you're of course right. It is hard to go back, except for the nostalgia.
On the other, do you know there is a scene of people still making brand new games for the Commodore 64 (and other home computers)? And selling them, too, these are not just free games. Of course the target audience is themselves, they make, sell and buy games within the community, but the point is it still exists.
Also there are artists making art in C64 graphics resolutions and color modes, and even PETSCII art enthusiasts (PETSCII is C64's text mode, which had some interesting symbols which facilitate creativity).